Shadow Begotten
by katmillia-and-churched
Summary: A broken man, half of a whole. And the girl, the one who smiled and sang. An entire world opened beneath their feet, but the true journey would be learning to live, and trust. Eventual Dark LinkxMalon.
1. Prologue

There was nothing around him– a cold blanket of nothing that chilled him to the bone.

Even when he opened his eyes, he couldn't see anything; his vision was only blackness, shadows and darkness, and he involuntarily sucked in a breath. Immediately, his lungs were cloyed with salt and seaweed– he was underwater. He thrashed, instincts taking over on high alert, chest screaming for air, and when he finally burst above the surface, the water came back up, burning his throat. He choked, gasping, and tried to right himself. It was still dark around him, nothing but inky shadows and the black depths of the unknown.

His feet found solid footing; solid enough, at least, that his heels could dig into it and propel his mass upwards, and he took it, heaving his aching and sputtering body up further. There were voices in his head, snippets of whispers against his ears, and though he could hear them, he could make out nothing of what they were saying. They blended with the images flashing before his eyes against the darkness. A wall of fire, a limping tree branch, a vine-covered wall– he didn't know what any of them meant, and they made his stomach clench and twist. His grappling fingers finally brushed up against the sugar-fine sands, and his fists clenched around it, even though it did little good. One final push with his foot and he was on land, face first in the granules and spewing salt-water. Everything burned.

He writhed in the sand's grasp, twisting like the snake he might have been once until he was lying on his back. Air only slightly less thick than the water brushed against his face, cold and colder still, the winds of the lake. His chest heaved, his heart - was that his heart? - beat a thunderous tattoo, and he wanted to lay there forever. Let him turn to sand, let his charred body become mulch for the birds to feed on.

A slight pressure on his head - a garland of daisies. The voice of a green-haired pixie. "You and I will always be friends, Link."

A pat on his back, a hand like rocks, his knees sinking to the ground. His body, a child's body. "Now you and I are sworn brothers!"

He stood on shaky legs. He had not known until that moment if he could stand... if he would stand. One foot forward, and then another. His feet felt sluggish, water streaming down his entire body, from one point to another, nothing discernible. His joints cracked with the onslaught of movement, every possible bone screaming with the exertion - too much, he thought, and amazed himself with it. I can't do it. I can't. I--

A mountain towering over a village, a towering palisade. A cacophony of voices, together as one, shouting his name - shouting a name. The crackle of fire, hot against his face.

And a girl, with ginger hair and a smile he felt down to his knees.

"What is this?!" he cried, into his hands as he fell, only half-aware that he had said anything out loud. His own voice echoed back at him, compounding in volume and hurling against his already heightened senses. He could not make sense of the images being laid before his vision, nor the thoughts whirling through his head. His vision finally began to sharpen, bits and pieces of terrain coming into focus at the edges of his gaze; he could see the water he had just come from, and the beige blur of the sand beneath his body, and then, like a streak of paint, the cerulean of the sky above him. He did not know sky. He had never _seen _sky– but he did know it, in his bones, in his very essence, a missing puzzle piece he had not even known he was without.

Dazed, he tried again to stand. Righting himself was even more difficult the second time, and the voices in his head made it hard to concentrate on what he was finally seeing. The landscape looked bleached out, too white; it hurt his head when he opened his eyes, and he forced them apart anyway. He took one staggering step, and then another, barely able to believe he was actually moving.

It felt like an eternity before he turned and looked, and saw the crashing tide yards behind him, and the trailing wet holes of his footsteps.

The horizon went on beyond all possibility, water so pure and crystal, a distance shore beyond it, followed by the sky, the sun. He lifted his face to the sun, staring into its apex as the corona twitched and flailed, invisible hands reaching out to him, warming his face, drying his body. He might have stood there forever, cradled by the sun's rays, listening as he learned to listen, the crash of the waves, the screech of the birds, the rustling of the wind in the grass. He did not understand. Why were these things here? He searched for the answer within the essence that had given him so much surety mere moments ago - why? why? why? - but found nothing, darkness, a soothing balm that had lost its power. He felt hazy, somewhere, like a fog had descended into him, making his thoughts into mist. He tried to reach into his mind, into the place where he knew the past lay, but found only dull pain like rocks in his head.

A man who looked like him, his sword glinting keenly as it cut through the mist. The feeling of a blade in his hand, so natural, so perfect. Looking into his own eyes, feeling himself looking back at him. The pain became sharper, more focused, sending spears of dazzling light into his eyes.

Before he understood what was happening, he leaned over and retched into the sand. All that came up was water.

Focus... focus on the sword, he told himself. The sharpness, the flash of steel, the sound it made as it cut through air. In an alien gesture, he reached over his shoulder and felt his hand touch something. He retracted his hand abruptly, before reaching again, as if extending his limb to a poisonous snake. His fingers wrapped around the hilt, the words appearing in his mind as he relearned it, tighter and tighter still, before pulling. Steel rang out against leather as he stared down at it. The sword was black as nothing, and it wasn't right - hadn't he pulled it from the pedestal? Wasn't it the colour of steel, with a blue hilt? He dropped it as if it had burned, and the blade fell into the sand soundlessly. It wasn't right. It wasn't. He didn't want it. He wanted to be away from it, wanted to run, wanted to be somewhere else.

"Wait!" a soft voice broke through the haze. "Link, you almost forgot your sword," the voice chided, and he felt syrupy inside. There was a girl, the girl with the smile.

"I don't need a sword," he said - him, the him that was standing in the sand, the him that wanted to run. His mouth felt numb. These weren't his words, but he said them anyway.

"Yes you _do_," she reprimanded. "I never go out into the field without my bow. Don't be reckless!"

"What– is this?" he croaked, too confused to be ashamed of the way his voice broke. "Is– is it mine?"

"Of course it's yours," the girl said, and then her image started to blur, melting in with the sand and the sea and the trees lining the edge of the beach just beyond his reach. He started to reach out to her, then stopped; had he meant to reach? Had he willed his hand to move? He let out a shuddering cry and pulled at the bits of hair that fell just over his eyes, willing the strands to come out in his hands– if he could feel, was any of it real?

When he looked down, there were shadows swirling around his feet. They danced like spiders over the sand, inky against the bleached yellow of the dunes, and inched their way towards the soles of his boots. He stared at them, unable to tear his eyes away and unable to move from their grasp, until the shadows had condensed like fingers on the leather covering his feet– sticky, sticky like molasses and the color of dried blood, they pulled him down.

They pulled him _down._

He wanted to succumb to them, then - wanted to succumb so badly. He wanted to let them pull him into the sound, until he drowned in the granules, until he felt nothing else, until he was back in darkness' icy arms. But he was scared, too - fear gripped his chest like a frigid claw, a cold ribbon around his beating heart, and he let loose a guttural, raw cry. His feet worked of their own accord, a dance move too fast to describe, the sword that wasn't his flung straight into the air where he caught it, brandishing it with a flourish. The shadows twirled around him, growing taller and in the shape of monsters, leaning into him as he swung the sword. His arms did the work, bones to muscle to skin, dancing a dance ingrained into his very existence, and he understood, then.

This is what he was for. The bringer of salvation. The vanquisher of monsters. The murderer of anything that was different than he.

"I - understand!" he screamed, as he swung his sword in a weaving circle, only a glint of steel as he worked, too fast for the eyes to see. This was all he knew, this was all he was.

This is why Din had fashioned him out of fire. This is why Nayru had cooled him into bone. This is why Farore had given him thought.

The shadows fell to their defeat. He should have let them have him.

He could see now, what the world around him really was; there was a fuzzy, blurry line, almost like a line drawn in the sand, where the darkness ended. He put a hand inside it, watching as the flesh of his fingers paled and whitened. His hand looked as if it had no skin left, only the milk-white of bone, and he looked up. The shadow was not a line, as he had thought– no, it was much more than a line. It was a _world_. It was a hovering, all-encompassing fog that shifted over the landscape and pulled it in. It was the low-hanging clouds that threatened to rain. It was a place both ominous and dangerous; he could smell the evil lingering in the shadows, just as he could feel it in his bones.

He could feel the fear that palpitated every corner of the darkness, and he did not know where it came from. The voices and thoughts in his mind went still– they had nothing to offer. The scrambled bits and pieces he had within his wiring did not have any connection to the shadow-covered field just beyond Lake Hylia's edge.

He should have felt lost.

He didn't.

Instead, he felt as if he were home, and it was a bitter taste in the back of his throat; his home was the darkness, after all, despite everything else. He pulled his hand from the shadows, and tried to focus on the images still reeling like a carousel in his mind's eyes. If he could find something, even one thing, that looked familiar, perhaps it would be explained. Perhaps he could fit back together the jigsaw of his memory.

Smiles and ginger hair, hands clasped, the rumbling of laughter within rocks– none of it made any _sense_, but he had the thoughts. If he could find the sources, the originals, maybe–

Maybe he could put back together what had been lost.


	2. Chapter One

"Thank you, Marin. That'll be all."

"Actually, it's Ma--" She paused mid-correction to blow an errant strand from her forehead. She knew by next week he'd have a different name for her. "Uh, you're welcome. I'll see you next week, Professor Arkham."

She didn't bother waiting for his acknowledgement. She also knew that he'd rearrange his notes of research for a few minutes before turning to her with a very real, 'Marin! What are you doing here?', at which point she'd remind him of his milk delivery before sidling out as quickly as possible.

Once, she had enjoyed these weekly trips to his research lodge at the lake. Three years ago, Malon had taken over the task from her father, making weekly rounds to Castle Town, Kakariko, and Lake Hylia, when his back had began to fail him. At first, Arkham had welcomed her presence with a smile and a cup of tea and mutton, asking her about life outside his secluded hut, and eventually regaling her with stories about her mother's struggle to be allowed to study at the collegiate school in Castle Town - at the time, the only educational establishment of any worth, despite women and non-Hylians not being allowed to officially attend. But over the last year, Arkham had been slowly forgetting things: where he placed his spectacles, the fact that it was her delivery day, her own name. He stopped inviting her for tea and a story, and she had not bothered to ask.

To assauge her guilt at letting an ill old man toil on with no family or friends, she resolved to spend more time with her own ailing father. It almost worked. With a sigh, Malon closed the door quietly behind her and smiled as Gretha rose his head to greet her. She ran a hand along his neck and mane, a familial caress. At least when her horses went mad with old age, they did it quietly.

Gretha wrenched his head to nip at her fingers, before huffing loudly. Malon pressed her lips together as she took hold of his reins. Although Gretha wasn't as feral or untamed as, say, Stormthrall (that name was no accident, given on a day when Malon was both frustrated and poetic; never a good combination), she knew when he was agitated. "What's wrong, boy?"

The horse stamped at the sand, whinnying softly into her hand, and she frowned down at the beige expanse beneath her feet, granules mingling with blades of waving grass. If there was a snake nearby, she wished to scare it off before it got the chance to bite her mount; medicine for the poison would run a fortune, and they could hardly afford to lose one of their horses. She kicked a bit at the grass, checking for reptiles, and when she didn't see any movement, turned back to her still stamping steed.

"Well?" she asked, even though Gretha couldn't answer her. She had nearly dismissed the agitation entirely when she spotted the dark circles in the sand a few yards out. They were evenly placed, rhythmic, and alternating; it wouldn't have meant anything had she not noticed the rounded bottom and converging top. They were footprints.

She immediately worried that Professor Arkham had left his house– she hadn't been gone that long, but the man was very nearly completely senile, and if he drowned in the lake because he was confused, she would never forgive herself. She walked out from where Gretha and the cart were standing, checking to see if the tracks had a path or trail in mind. They led up through the sands to where the grass started in full, and then she lost them– they were leading away from the water, not towards it, and she breathed a quick sigh of relief. At least she could be sure that no one had accidentally drowned.

The puzzling aspect was that the tracks led from the water itself. She stared down, confused. They were very obvious boot tracks, not Zora in nature, and certainly not something the webbed beings would consider wearing after just exiting the very lake they lived in. She let her gaze move along them until they reached the grass. There was nothing within the grass that clarified any of her questions– but her curiosity had been piqued.

Lifting her eyes to the horizon, she remembered the fisherman's house. The tide had risen high again, making the walk from the fisherman's house to the shore almost impossible. On a good day, it was a tedious journey trying to get Gretha from one shore to another. On a bad day, it was not even worth attempting. He would not have ventured out, she knew that.

Pulling the edges of her waistcoat closer to one another, she turned back to Gretha. The stallion was flailing and bucking frustratedly, struggling against its reins and the pull of the buggy. Her mouth twisted. He was going to be no help, and while her instinctive urge was to go to him, she remembered how Stormthrall had clipped her in the temple with his hoof and left her unable to do her work without seeing spots for almost three weeks. The wind grew more bitter as it caused her skirt to whip against her legs, the rustle of the grass almost impossibly loud.

"Sorry, Gretha," she said, not really sorry at all. She worked quickly, unlatching the buggy from its less than calm carrier. All her horses knew the way back to the ranch - she made sure of that. The stallion gave one last agitated whinny before departing over the hills and out of sight. A buggy without a horse to ferry it around was useless, and aside from the royal stables, hers were the only horses in Hyrule proper.

She waited a few minutes before taking off in the general direction Gretha had gone, making careful study of the trail of footprints.

Peering closer, she could see that whoever it was that had made the tracks had definitely continued on through the grassy areas; blades were bent and clipped, and some were trampled entirely. Whoever it was had not been walking entirely straight, and, from the look of things, might even have been dragging one foot for a portion of the journey. Such a sign pointed towards injury, and it made Malon's worry level rise another notch. Lake Hylia was not a heavily populated area, and if someone had been hurt, it could be days, or even weeks, before someone else found the poor soul.

She looked up to where her horse had disappeared, and then took a sharp right, heading into the underbrush. Twigs and leaves struck her leg and pinched her skin, and she tried to ignore them. She'd been through much worse, anyway.

It took a few moments before she found another sign that a person had passed through– a belt was lying on the ground, half-hidden by the waving grass. She reached forward and picked it up, feeling the leather with the pads of her fingertips. It was wet; saturated, even, and was starting to dry in sections, leaving the brown color mottled and uneven.

What kind of person stumbled from a body of water into the brush and removed their belt? Malon let her fingers close around it tightly, feeling the edge of the accessory biting into her palm.

The wet leather chafed against the skin of her hand, but she did not relent. There had been only one set of foot prints, leading out of the water. The person might have come to the lake at the opposite end, but as far as she knew, the lake was succeeded by forests too rife with monsters to live in, and the desert beyond that. Was this person a Gerudo? No, she told herself. The belt belonged to a man. As far as she knew, Gerudo women were incapable of giving birth to men.

Malon paused, and thought.

She was no stranger to the waters of Lake Hylia. She had taught herself to swim when she was little, by secretly accompanying her father on his deliveries and then taking off when his back was turned, only to jump off one of the small portruding islands of rock. She found that learning to swim was quite easy when she threw herself into deep water and there was no one else around. She remembered the feeling, that initial moment where she breaks the surface, and although the water felt so cold, as it sank into her skin, something happened. It was like she was elsewhere, encased and protected, floundering and diving, warm and cold at the same time. It was like peace. She was safe, in there. The water couldn't hurt her because she _was_ the water.

She had often find herself praying at that moment to be made into a Zora... but no one ever listened.

Later, she found out that proper ladies didn't do that. While Malon was still waiting to meet one of these proper ladies of old, her time at the lake mostly belonged to deliveries. That, and a soaked tunic and skirt was quite inconvenient.

Still, she had once, at her most brave, attempted the depths of the lake. Watching Zora glide beneath her, gracefully, every piece of them built for submersion, the fragmented and blurry rays of the sun glinting off their scales, had seemed like the closest thing she would ever come to beauty. Still, she had been a child, with a child's body, and had only made it so far before her arms felt leaden and her little lungs protested their malnourishment. She had not been graceful in that moment, kicking, clawing, screaming if the option had been presented to her, trying to break the surface and relearn the world of grass and sky. She had made it, of course. She had no idea how long she had spent, her cheek pressed against the grass of the plateau as birds circled her lain form.

She had glimpsed something, though. Something more beautiful than the Zora. The home of their worship, the submerged gateway to their temple.

There was a legend that the Zora raised men there, raised them as Zora, bestowing upon them great magics and teaching them to swim and walk blindfolded, so they'd never see their own reflections.

She wondered if the legends were true.

Malon shook her head; thinking of such things would do little good if there was actually someone hurt and needing aid in the bushes beyond where she stood. She couldn't afford to get herself lost in her fantasies, no matter how much she had once wished that the person from the legend, being trained and molded under the water, was none other than herself. The water was soothing, but it wasn't reality– reality, she had discovered long ago, had a bite to it that few other things could match.

And so she started forward again, gripping the belt like a lifeline in her hand, until there was a snap of a twig in front of her. She paused, frightened for a moment, and simply gazed through the parting branches of the thicket to see what was making the noise up ahead. She could see only a shadow, a dark blur of a figure, and she took a step closer. Her heel closed down upon a twig, breaking it in half, and she froze once more. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she thought she saw the figure pause; then it turned and began moving again, and she let out the unconscious breath she'd been holding.

Whoever it was did not seem to be injured– or, if they were, they were moving quite well for one having just sustained injuries. The figure was moving through the bushes with a jilted but steady pace. She did not know of any reason the person would be down by Lake Hylia in the first place, nor why they would be moving through the thick brush on the Lake's far end: there was nothing on the other end of the thicket worth seeing, and certainly nothing of value to be gained by moving through it... other than stealth. Her breath hitched once more, thinking it could be a thief or a murderer– until she almost laughed and shook her head to clear the thoughts. She was letting her imagination run away with her again, and it wasn't helping.

More movement up ahead, and she craned her neck to see. She caught only a flash of a dark tunic, and the leather of boots; both common enough in nature.

Malon resisted the childish urge to bite down on her sleeve in apprehension, instead swatting at more of the thorny branches in her way.

A snake slithered near her feet, its belly sliding against the dirt and its head bobbing to some unseen rhythm.

She tried to remember what colour of a snake's scales indicated its saliva was poisonous, but as it came closer to her boots, she ground her toe into the dirt and kicked it several feet away, where it slithered into the underbrush and disappeared.

Steel rang out against leather. She stopped, the rapid beating of her heart leaving no blood to go to her feet and remind them to move. The swoosh of steel through air. A frightened, predatory hiss through fangs, cut off midway.

The patter of damp leather against dirt and sparse grass became rushed, and then stopped entirely. She heard a strangled grunt, and then the fluttering of dozens of agitated wings. Above her, tens upon tens of birds dove upward, breaking through the thicket of forest and flying away for their life. For a brief second, they were the sky, clotting up the pale blue and sparsely grey milieu with their brown wings, beating faster than her heart, their disturbed cries all she could hear.

She looked forward. The dark figure was gone. Malon continued following the tracks regardless, clutching the belt so tightly in her hand her skin turned white. Whoever he was, now he knew someone was following him. A part of her wanted to turn back, to return to the lake and try to figure out how she was supposed to get the horseless buggy back to the ranch. But the longer she held onto the belt, the warmer it became inside her grip.

The fact that he had not turned to attack her meant something, though she didn't know what it was. She could rule out the criminal notion; someone running from the law would not hesitate in killing a stalker, especially not while in such a remote location. She crept forward, increasing her speed in hopes of catching whoever it was. She didn't know why she kept going– she just did.

It took awhile for her to spot another sign of the man she was tracking, and when she finally did, her heart stopped a bit. She could see the back of his tunic as he knelt down in the rock, where the ground began to slope upward in the sharp incline of the mountains, fingers pressed down to the ground amidst small pebbles. The tunic was a dark grain, and, like the belt, had been recently wet; patches of it were drying, marked by a darker, richer hue. He wore a hat over his head that allowed none of his hair to be seen, but as he cocked his head to one side, she caught a glimpse of hair spilling out from the front. It was silvery, almost white, looking feather-light and fine. His boots were a standard norm, and he had on a leather belt. She thought perhaps she'd made a mistake, when she realized she had a similar looking accessory in her hands, but peering closer, could identify that the belt he was still wearing was nothing more than a scabbard holder, and hardly meant to be used to keep clothing in place.

And the scabbard was not empty. He had a sword, hilt sticking up past his arm and shining in the waning sunlight.

Malon crouched down, hoping that she could stay silent enough to continue observing. He didn't look like anyone she had seen before– at least not from the back, that was. She'd never seen anyone with such silvery hair save for the aging merchants in Kakariko, and even then, their hair was more salt-and-peppered than pure, molten silver. And the sword meant he was some kind of soldier or mercenary, and she was fairly certain that had he been either, she would have come into contact with him before.

Which could only mean he was not from Hyrule at all, and the thought chilled her.

She tried to take a closer look at the hilt of the sword, because often times knights and soldiers kept insignia on their blades to identify them to others, but the man shifted to look up at the incline of the mountain, and his movement distracted her. She could barely see the bridge of his upturned nose from over the dark linen of the hat, and something seemed very familiar. She felt the sweeping oddity of deja vu roll over her, and didn't know why. There was something in the man's stance, in his movements, in the way he held his body and his neck; she knew it, somehow. She found familiarity in the quick movements of his arms, in the way he acted first and looked second, in that brief flash of skin on his neck before his hair started, when his cap swayed. His skin was grey and ashen, almost not a colour at all, but what things become when all the colour is taken from them.

Malon stood up and took a tentative step forward, sidling against the rocks. A twig broke underneath the press of her foot, a crack as loud as bone in the still air.

Before she knew what was happening, the strange man had unsheathed his sword and was holding it a few inches from her neck. He seethed, his nostrils flaring as air expounded in the chill, his jaw tensing. But he said nothing.

He didn't need to.

Malon's heart beat a crescendo against her breast. Her eyes widened and blurred with the familiarity, and she wanted to laugh, and scream. It was Link. But it wasn't the Link she had once laughed with, not the Link she had taught to milk cows, not the Link who had pressed his hand against her back in a gestury of courtesy whenever they walked together. The way he looked at her, his ashen eyes probing her frightened face, all questioning, no tenderness, she knew it. It was a shadow of her Link. It had never been the boy that had eventually become a man, it was just something the man left behind: a fragment, a piece of skin, a distant memory. His eyes narrowed, and what he thought, she could not guess.

The ching of steel against leather was the first thing that told her he had moved again. It was a few minutes before she could move, before she could let out a breath and tell herself that the sword was gone and her head was still attached. In those few minutes, he had taken off like a startled rabbit, running for hell and highwater, becoming just a spot in her vision as he disappeared into the setting sun.

He was heading toward Kakariko.

Malon touched the spot where the edge of his sword had met the flesh of her neck. It didn't sting, and she could feel no droplets of spilt blood. She stared at the place where the Link-clone had been only moments earlier, trying to make sense of what she had just seen. There was no possible way that he could be her Link; yet there was no possible way he could be anything but, either. Everything was the same, down to the curve of his cheekbones, except that he looked like a painting that had had all the hue sucked dry from it, leaving behind only varying shades of gray.

It had to be magic. Magic, or something she didn't know, and couldn't understand. Either way, he was Link– or, part of Link, at least. She thought about calling out to him, but he was long gone, and she didn't know if it would do any good. He had startled like a horse after spotting a snake, and she knew better than most the dangers of trying to chase down a frightened stallion.

Kakariko Village was a day's walk ahead on foot, and the buggy was still sitting motionless in the grass near Lake Hylia behind her. She studied the high walls of Lon Lon Ranch, letting her gaze skim over the jagged edges of the trellis. She could stop in and get a horse, but she'd be faced with questions on why she let Gretha run free and where their only good buggy was and what was she doing with a horse, anyway? She didn't want to deal with that, and she didn't want to frighten not-Link anymore than he already was. Being approached on horseback by a perfect stranger made no one feel comfortable.

Malon didn't know when she had begun to care. She almost wished she hadn't seen his face. She hardly needed the reminder, the re-emergence of the memories and the bad taste they left in her mouth. Her fingers moved deftly as she buttoned up the length of her waistcoat, the fastening a good distraction from the dark alley her thoughts had drifted down.

The sun sunk down beyond the horizon, the last vestiges of its rays no longer warming her skin.

He was not in his right mind, she could assume that much. And, it was her fault that he had ran to Kakariko. If he hurt any of the villagers in his mania...

Malon bit back a swallow of nervousness, and let the fierce heat of anger warm her blood and lend fire to her step. Whoever he was, he wore Link's face, smearing a hero's legacy - her hero's legacy - with insanity. He had killed that snake. He may have killed birds. He was volatile and unnaturally startled, and he looked like a ghost playing at being a person. This was her land. She had her home in the grass and the sun and the land, the land that whispered along to the songs she used to sing. It was not the place for the games of a ghost.

With a new resolve, she started the walk to Kakariko village.


End file.
